Tuesday, December 2, 2008

Try This Tuesday - The Use of Puppets-Speech and Communication

Another benefit of puppets ( besides getting what you want) is that they are a terrific way to promote speech skills, and communication. Hopefully I will post about other uses of puppets next week.)

COMMUNICATIONJust as your child likes hearing “clean up this pigsty of a room!” better from Muppet than from you, your child may also feel more at ease telling about some incident of the day through puppets. If you suspect that your hesitant, yet verbal, child is upset about something, give him puppets to play with. You may even pretend to “do” something else, while keeping your ears “on alert”. Or you might play along, also with a puppet, creating a scenario that will allow him to express his feelings.

SPEECH SKILLSPuppets are an excellent way to practice speech skills. Often a child or teen may hesitate to try certain things (in the realm of speech) in your presence, fearing that they will “slip up”. A puppet takes a bit of the pressure off the child, because if the puppet makes a mistake, that is the mistake of the puppet, not him. And besides all that, puppets are fun and cute!

4 comments:

I can usually tell the good TSS's from the bad ones at work by looking at which ones let the older kids use puppets when asked. The good ones usually agree, noting their importance, while the bad ones reject them as "for little kids" or flat-out reject the request. And some kids who say almost nothing on their won will get quite expressive with puppets.Plenty of role play gets done this way too. Thumbs up on this suggestion.

We have had great success having longer and more on-target conversations using stuffed animals. My son's speech therapist uses puppets during some school sessions as well, which I was really pleased to hear.

We've had some success with a stuffed Thomas the Tank Engine, once our boys had developed their pretend play skills to a certain point. Before that, they got upset whenever we tried any pretending, but now I think practicing with "pillow friends" actually helps them develop their pretend play skills in addition to their communication skills. Great suggestion!

A description of this blog

This blog is basically a diary, journal, and notes of observations. In the past it dealt mostly with the topics of special needs, especially a real view of what life is like with (and for) a teen with Down syndrome. However, since Ricki's death in August 2012, at age 17, the amount of blogging on the subject of "special needs" has decreased. Additional topics are interpersonal relationships, life in Israel, and dieting. (I have lost 75 kilos...)(And no, I did NOT have weight-loss surgery....) Also an occasional get-on-a-soapbox-and-tell-it-like-it-is personal opinion.

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